Poetic Memoirs, Collections, and Nonfiction Books for Your Book Club

At 19, as Tretheway set out to start her life, her mother’s was brutally ended. An abusive former stepfather first tried to kill her mother and was imprisoned. Once he was released, he tried again and succeeded. Tretheway examines all of her life leading up to that fateful moment, which includes recounting her happy childhood in the south as the child of a Black mother and white father, and traveling back to the place her mother was killed. With poetic precision, she reopens old wounds and wades through her grief. Tretheway won a Pulitzer for Native Guard and was appointed the United States Poet Laureate in 2012.